THE RETREAT.
I ARRIVED at St. Petersburg, and found the Czarina, whose conjugal
perfidy was more than suspected, tolerably resigned to the extinction of
that dazzling life whose incalculable and god-like utility it is
reserved for posterity to appreciate! I have observed, by the way, that
in general men are the less mourned by their families in proportion as
they are the more mourned by the community. The great are seldom
amiable; and those who are the least lenient to our errors are
invariably our relations!
Many circumstances at that time conspired to make my request to quit the
imperial service appear natural and appropriate. The death of the Czar,
joined to a growing jealousy and suspicion between the English monarch
and Russia, which, though long existing, was now become more evident and
notorious than heretofore, gave me full opportunity to observe that my
pardon had been obtained from King George three years since, and that
private as well as national ties rendered my return to England a measure
not only of expediency but necessity. The imperial Catherine granted me
my dismissal in the most flattering terms, and added the high
distinction of the Order founded in honour of the memorable feat by
which she had saved her royal consort and the Russian army to the Order
of St. Andrew, which I had already received.
I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pomp
which became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, I
commenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. Although I
had alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of my
retirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visiting
Italy previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, had
recommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills my
constitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in my
own heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the Divine
Land for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeed
astonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn for
lands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southern
sky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the vast
ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of the
shore.
I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,
entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a short
time; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, the
Ausonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrous
beauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It may
serve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, however
important, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a nature
deeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold nor
unenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to city or
ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all my
train, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickened
with a hermit's love.
It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found the
object of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with my
philosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whose
voice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so long
obtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,
as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,
became open to the mute yet eloquent loveliness of this most fairy
earth; and hill and valley, the mirror of silent waters, the sunny
stillness of woods, and the old haunts of satyr and nymph, revived in me
the fountains of past poetry, and became the receptacles of a thousand
spells, mightier than the charms of any enchanter save Love, which was
departed,--Youth, which was nearly gone,--and Nature, which (more
vividly than ever) existed for me still.
I chose, then, my retreat. As I was fastidious in its choice, I cannot
refrain from the luxury of describing it. Ah, little did I dream that I
had come thither, not only to find a divine comfort but the sources of a
human and most passionate woe! Mightiest of the Roman bards! in whom
tenderness and reason were so entwined, and who didst sanctify even
thine unholy errors with so beautiful and rare a genius! what an
invariable truth one line of thine has expressed: "Even in the fairest
fountain of delight there is a secret and evil spring eternally bubbling
up and scattering its bitter waters over the very flowers which surround
its margin!"
In the midst of a lovely and tranquil vale was a small cottage; that was
my home. The good people there performed for me all the hospitable
offices I required. At a neighbouring monastery I had taken the
precaution to make myself known to the superior. Not all Italians--no,
nor all monks--belong to either of the two great tribes into which they
are generally divided,--knaves or fools. The Abbot Anselmo was a man of
rather a liberal and enlarged mind; he not only kept my secret, which
was necessary to my peace, but he took my part, which was perhaps
necessary to my safety. A philosopher, who desires only to convince
himself, and upon one subject, does not require many books. Truth lies
in a small compass; and for my part, in considering any speculative
subject, I would sooner have with me one book of Euclid as a model than
all the library of the Vatican as authorities. But then I am not fond
of drawing upon any resources but those of reason for reasonings: wiser
men than I am are not so strict. The few books that I did require were,
however, of a nature very illicit in Italy; the good Father passed them
to me from Ravenna, under his own protection. "I was a holy man," he
said, "who wished to render the Catholic Church a great service, by
writing a vast book against certain atrocious opinions; and the works I
read were, for the most part, works that I was about to confute." This
report gained me protection and respect; and, after I had ordered my
agent at Ravenna to forward to the excellent Abbot a piece of plate, and
a huge cargo of a rare Hungary wine, it was not the Abbot's fault if I
was not the most popular person in the neighbourhood.
But to my description: my home was a cottage; the valley in which it lay
was divided by a mountain stream, which came from the forest Apennine, a
sparkling and wild stranger, and softened into quiet and calm as it
proceeded through its green margin in the vale. And that margin, how
dazzlingly green it was! At the distance of about a mile from my hut,
the stream was broken into a slight waterfall, whose sound was heard
distinct and deep in that still place; and often I paused, from my
midnight thoughts, to listen to its enchanted and wild melody. The fall
was unseen by the ordinary wanderer, for, there, the stream passed
through a thick copse; and even when you pierced the grove, and gained
the water-side, dark trees hung over the turbulent wave, and the silver
spray was thrown upward through the leaves, and fell in diamonds upon
the deep green sod.
This was a most favoured haunt with me: the sun glancing through the
idle leaves; the music of the water; the solemn absence of all other
sounds, except the songs of birds, to which the ear grew accustomed,
and, at last, in the abstraction of thought, scarcely distinguished from
the silence; the fragrant herbs; and the unnumbered and nameless flowers
which formed my couch,--were all calculated to make me pursue
uninterruptedly the thread of contemplation which I had, in the less
voluptuous and harsher solitude of the closet, first woven from the web
of austerest thought. I say pursue, for it was too luxurious and
sensual a retirement for the conception of a rigid and severe train of
reflection; at least it would have been so to me. But when the thought
/is once born/, such scenes seem to me the most fit to cradle and to
rear it. The torpor of the physical appears to leave to the mental
frame a full scope and power; the absence of human cares, sounds, and
intrusions, becomes the best nurse to contemplation; and even that
delicious and vague sense of enjoyment which would seem, at first, more
genial to the fancy than the mind, preserves the thought undisturbed
because contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lapped in
sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,--a
dream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with more
than the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of waking life.
A little way from this waterfall was a fountain, a remnant of a classic
and golden age. Never did Naiad gaze on a more glassy mirror, or dwell
in a more divine retreat. Through a crevice in an overhanging mound of
the emerald earth, the father stream of the fountain crept out, born,
like Love, among flowers, and in the most sunny smiles; it then fell,
broadening and glowing, into a marble basin, at whose bottom, in the
shining noon, you might see a soil which mocked the very hues of gold,
and the water insects, in their quaint shapes and unknown sports,
grouping or gliding in the mid-most wave. A small temple of the
lightest architecture stood before the fountain, and in a niche therein
a mutilated statue,--possibly of the Spirit of the place. By this
fountain my evening walk would linger till the short twilight melted
away and the silver wave trembled in the light of the western star. Oh,
then what feelings gathered over me as I turned slowly homeward! the air
still, breathless, shining; the stars gleaming over the woods of the far
Apennine; the hills growing huger in the shade; the small insects
humming on the wing; and, ever and anon, the swift bat, wheeling round
and amidst them; the music of the waterfall deepening on the ear; and
the light and hour lending even a mysterious charm to the cry of the
weird owl, flitting after its prey,--all this had a harmony in my
thoughts and a food for the meditations in which my days and nights were
consumed. The World moulders away the fabric of our early nature, and
Solitude rebuilds it on a firmer base.